My friend's dad was into electronics. He bought one of the samplers from the local Radio Shack, opened it up, figured out how it worked, and started making his own. He sold them to us for about $40. Which was so much money as a kid (and in the 90s), but damn it was awesome.

I ended up recouping the costs of the sampler many times over though: the local radio station had a competition of "guess what this song-played-backwards is and win $100". I'd sample the song snippet as they played it, reverse it in a tracker (like in the video where he reverses the reverse cymbal) and get the song... then it was just a matter of being the correct caller - battling mostly against my other friends with our home-made samplers. I won $500 doing that!

[Edit: oh, you mean the computer hardware, not the sampler hardware! My A500 was second-hand, no memory upgrade (grr) - and if my parents got it for me then there's no way it was more than a couple of hundred bucks ;) ]

> I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive.

It cost money, but the next step would have been a rack sampler and probably a mixer which were much more expensive.

Yeah, an Amiga 500 with RRP £499 in 1987 is about £1440 today.